Ruth Bader Ginsburg

May 20, 2009

This piece is from our archives: It was published on May 20, 2009.
In March, 2008, Martha Nussbaum, a law professor at the University of Chicago, traveled with Judge Diane Wood to a conference in India. The topic was affirmative action in higher education, and before the conference began, they went to Kolkata to meet women leaders who were gathered to talk about how women should claim their legal rights. "Diane borrowed half of my Indian wardrobe and came in like an Indian woman," Nussbaum recalls.

May 23, 2008

Whenever political scientists want to demonstrate how little the public knows about politics, one of the statistics they're fond of pulling out is that more than half of Americans can't name any Supreme Court justice.

January 30, 2008

May 21, 2007

“THANK GOD for President Bush, and thank God for Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito,” intoned Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention last week, after the Supreme Court announced its decision in Gonzales v. Carhart, the so-called partial-birth abortion case. But Land also should have thanked Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose majority opinion dangerously reframes the abortion debate.
Kennedy doesn’t proceed from the question of harm to the unborn—the premise on which the congressional act in question is based.

July 07, 2003

In the months leading up to the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, it was hard not to feel a sense of dread. At other great moments of constitutional drama—the decision to reaffirm Roe in 1992 and to settle the presidential election of 2000—the justices had allowed an inflated sense of their own importance to distort their judgment and compromise their reasoning.

July 09, 2001

I may be a winner! The Supreme Court held this week that The New York Times violated my rights when it published four freelance op-ed pieces of mine between 1986 and 1995 and then sent them to Lexis-Nexis, the electronic database, without my permission.

December 24, 2000

ON MONDAY, WHEN the Supreme Court heard arguments in Bush v. Gore, there was a sense in the courtroom that far more than the election was at stake. I ran into two of the most astute and fair-minded writers about the Court, who have spent years defending the institution against cynics who insist the justices are motivated by partisanship rather than reason. Both were visibly shaken by the Court's emergency stay of the manual recount in Florida; they felt naïve and betrayed by what appeared to be a naked act of political will.

January 05, 1998

Civic Ideals: Conflicting Views of Citizenship in U.S. History
by Rogers M. Smith
(Yale University Press, 719 pp., $35)
A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case called Lorelyn Penero Miller v. Madeleine K. Albright, and some of the drama of the case is encapsulated in the petitioner's name. Twenty-seven years ago in the Philippines, Lorelyn Penero Miller was born out of wedlock.

May 05, 1997

A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law by Antonin Scalia
(Princeton University Press, 159 pp., $19.95)
Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution
by Jack N. Rakove
(Knopf, 420 pp., $35)
We are all originalists now. That is to say, most judges and legal scholars who want to remain within the boundaries of respectable constitutional discourse agree that the original meaning of the Constitution and its amendments has some degree of pertinence to the question of what the Constitution means today.